Field of the Invention
The invention relates to an image processing apparatus.
Description of the Background Art
Conventionally, a camera that is mounted on a vehicle, as an image capturing part that captures an image of surrounding of the vehicle, has been known. The images captured by the camera are provided to, for example, a driver of the vehicle.
However, there is a case where rain drops or water drops due to snow are attached to a lens of the camera because of, for example, rainfall or snowfall. Thus, a water drop removing apparatus has been proposed to remove the water drops on the lens by a manual operation by the driver of the vehicle by outputting compressed air toward the lens of the camera.
However, in a case where the water drop removing apparatus is manually operated, it is very difficult to keep the lens of the camera free from water drops. Thus, a technology that automatically determines presence of the water drops on the lens of the camera based on a captured image has been requested. Especially, for a system that constantly needs to recognize the captured images, for example, a system accurately recognizes a position of the vehicle by detecting a white line or a mark on a road based on the images captured by the camera, in a case where water drops are on the lens of the camera, accuracy of recognizing the position of the vehicle may decrease.